


N4-73 (Revamped)

by Neriad13



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Angst, CW: Graphic Violence, Depression, F/M, Fourth Wall Breakage, Grief/Mourning, Institute Wins, POV Second Person, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Raising the dead is not a healthy coping mechanism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-09
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 22:31:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13257963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neriad13/pseuds/Neriad13
Summary: Weighed down by her grief, the Sole Survivor tries to make her way alone in an unfamiliar and unforgiving world. She has resigned herself to her husband's death and all that followed. Or, at least, she thought she had.An Institute scientist with access to all the technology her underground paradise has ever yielded has much bigger plans in mind. Namely, a synth custom-crafted from the DNA of poor, dead Nate.But there's an additional wrinkle: the synth in question is very much not what she expected.





	N4-73 (Revamped)

**Author's Note:**

> This is a rewrite of an older work that I liked quite a lot and I'm much happier with how it turned out. Now with (future) smut and additional world and relationship-building detail! 
> 
> Check out the old one [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7460061), if you're interested and also don't mind spoilers.

“I could help you.” the doctor says sweetly, her bubblegum-pink smile a slash of color within the stark white walls of her office. Her lab coat is blindingly white. She wears heels that have never tramped across cracked soil, never sunk in the muck of a radioactive marsh. She peers out at you over a set of horn-rimmed glasses with lenses so thick that they nearly hide the glint in her watery eyes. 

You feel small and dirty before her. Your boots dragged the filth of the Wastes in with you, smudged the gleaming floors upon which you walked. Your jacket is riddled with bullet holes that you have patched - more often than not - with duct tape. Your armor is cracked and burnt, taken from the bodies of those who would hurt you (were they human?) slaughtered by your own hand. Your gun (you say you keep it because it is reliable and well-made but you know that is not the whole of it), rests comfortably on your hip, close at hand, should you need it here, in the sole bastion of safety in the Wastes of the Commonwealth. 

You are almost positive that she isn’t joking. No, the tone of her voice is too sincere, the curve of her smile, too beseeching. She _means_ what she says. She _desires_ what she proposes.  
_Why?_

You can’t imagine that she means to help you. The Institute has no place for altruism, nor an unwashed Director who besmirches everything she touches and vanishes for long stretches of time into the world above with nary a goodbye.  
You are almost certainly an experiment. A plaything. Your grief is a puzzle to be solved, your sorrow, a thing easily dissipated - if only she could find the right words. 

You nibble your lip and think on it.

She folds her hands on top of her desk like a patient schoolchild, waiting for the lesson to begin. You hear the bones in her back crack as she shifts in her seat. A light flickers behind her. Her office is not quite as well-kept as every other Institute scientist’s office that you’ve seen.

"A synth…husband?" you ask, testing the weight of each word on your tongue before you loose it upon her ears and yours. You are exceedingly conscious of the ridiculousness of the statement. It sounds so much worse aloud.

“Of course!” she chirps excitedly, bracing her hands on her desk, her eyes lighting up behind the nuka-cola bottle lenses of her glasses. Before you can fit another word in edgewise, she’s off, rambling away from a plane of existence that you can’t even hope to ascend to.

“…be a simple enough procedure. Just a flake of skin! That's all I ask of you. Well, I mean, I could send a Gen 2 team up there if you’d prefer, but I don’t imagine that you’d like them tramping around in someplace so…sensitive. But if it’s too much for you - oh, I understand wholeheartedly - we could very well…”

You feel lightheaded. For a moment, the room spins in front of you. The doctor shifts in and out of focus, the smear of color across her face the only thing you can focus on. The only _real_ thing in a sea of overwhelming white and grey. 

“…of course, the downside of the experiment would be that he almost certainly wouldn't remember you, barring a grave miscalculation on the part of Robotics. He’d be a different person, albeit with the same DNA. Have you ever wondered how much of a share Nature and Nurture have in psycho-social development? This could very well furnish an answer to that question! Or the start of one, at least. The wonders of scientific inquiry never end, I tell you...” 

You feel something churning in the pit of your stomach. You miss him more than you can bear. Your loneliness is a void that draws all passion into its grasp. You are a being unique to all others in this world, trapped outside your own time, given a gift that you never once asked for. You hear her words from a distance, a background noise that you strain to make out.  
_Husband…_ she says, and your heart thumps so hard that for a moment, you think you might be dying. 

But…you are overwhelmed by the thought of seeing his face, of hearing his laugh, of sitting beside him at your campfire while the monsters of the wastes prowl just beyond the light. Your jaw quivers and you wish you could pull your goggles down to cover your eyes, that you hadn’t left them topside when you teleported here at her request. She shouldn’t see this. No one should see it.  
You shouldn’t _want_ this so badly and yet…

You taste bile at the back of your throat. Your hand rests protectively on your gun, an old habit borne of building a life in a place where firing a gun is as common as breathing.

A voice in the back of your head speaks. It says, _He is dead. You know this. You know that cannot be changed._

“…but that's the fun of it! Though I have to tell you, this experiment isn’t exactly… _sanctioned_ by the Board. I’d like you to keep it hush-hush for as long as possible. You know how they are. So...what do you say?”

It takes you a moment to realize that she’s stopped. That she’s asked you a question. That she’s waiting for an answer with baited breath, the gleam of her eyes shining like a spotlight on your grimy, Wastelander’s body. 

There is a vial and a pair of tweezers sitting on the desk before you. A receptacle for the…sample. Hardly knowing what you're doing, you pick them up. 

Your hands are shaking, the movement barely perceptible but present all the same. Can she see this? Can she smell your fear? What would she say if you set them down and walked away? 

You find that no matter how hard you try, that you cannot do anything of the sort. You secrete them away into the hidden pockets of your ragged jacket and slowly rise from the chair.

“Yes…” you hear yourself saying, your voice strangely calm and businesslike, “I’ll get it myself. The vault is close to where I live. And I wouldn’t want anyone to disturb the flowers…”

The single slash of color in the room grows thinner and wider, cracking open for but a moment to reveal teeth as pearly white as the rest of the Institute.

“Of course…” she goes on, plucking a clipboard from her desk and hurriedly running through the items on it, her eyes zooming back and forth across the lines of text. “I'd be periodically checking in with you, to make sure the synth's functioning correctly. He would be a prototype, a special model. Something we’ve never done before. And I won’t be sure how viable the cells are until I’ve got them under a microscope. Freshness is of the essence here. Ah, perhaps I should send you off with a cooler as well…” 

She lurches out inelegantly from behind her desk, her heels clicking on the hard, sterile floor. As she turns away and begins rummaging around in the cabinets behind her, she grunts under her breath at the copious items in her way that aren’t what she’s looking for.

You feel exhausted all of a sudden - like you’ve run a marathon in your sleep, like you’ve spent all day racing from the path of Suicider. Your eyelids droop and your breathing slows. You think of your clean white bed in your clean white room and the shower with gleaming tiles…

“I’d like to thank you.”

You jolt yourself awake. She’s standing in front of you, a tiny medical transport cooler in her outstretched hands.

“What you’re doing…it’ll advance the cause of epigenetics a hundred years. It could change how we build synths, how we look at their programming. It’s not often that we get a chance like this. And if I can in some small way make right what Kellog did wrong…well…”

You take the cooler, nod tensely and leave as fast as you are able.

***

You breathe in the dust of the vault and cough, though a bandana is tied tightly across your nose. The dry bones of the dead crunch under your feet. You kick them out of your way as you pass, scattering them against the hollow metal walls.

Once, you avoided them. You were afraid of them - of the people they’d been, of the empty-eyed shells they’d left behind. The ghost of some childish story haunted your head, urging you to pay respect to those who have fallen, to see them as something more than dust to be ground underfoot. But this was before you ventured out into the world and found a skeleton on every doorstep, a suicide in every bath. Before you had any inkling of how much space the dead took up in the world of the living.

The only sounds you can hear are the incessant drip of water, the heavy drag of your own footsteps and faint hum of machinery in the distance. 

Everything is as you left it. 

You stroll down the aisle of frozen faces, peering out in various states of hopeless awareness. Your see your own cryopod, its door hanging open, its plush seat rotten with mildew. You wrinkle your nose and close it up, the door making a faint _whoosh_ sound as it seals. 

For a moment, you stand there, knowing what looms behind you, having seen it a thousand times before, having purposefully visited it every day for a series of months - and yet, for all that, still finding it difficult to turn around and _face it._  
You steady your breathing, touch your gun for courage and whirl around.

Cracked vases of dead flowers are displayed on the floor in front of him. You kneel before them, the ground icy through the fabric of your suit. Every bloom is blackened and rotten. You feel a twinge of guilt for not coming down here as often as you once had and swallow it just as quickly, knowing that life had to go on, with or without him.  
You dump out the vases in an old vault sink and wash your hands afterward. There’s a bouquet of hubflowers, picked from the lands where you’d once made your home together, to replace them. You fill them up with fresh water from an Institute carton and arrange the blooms as prettily as you can.

The flowers look strange and unlovely in the green glow of your pip-boy, but it’s all you have to offer.

Enough procrastinating.

You rise to your feet, your knees creaking under you. You avoid eye contact with the frosted window that hides his face and without hesitation, hit the button that opens him to the elements.

His coffin opens, releasing a blast of frigid air that mists in the vault. His body is frosted with lacy patterns of ice. Snow rims his eyelashes. He has a look of sorrow on his face, an apology for what happened written on the pained wrinkles marring his brow.

 _I'm sorry,_ you hear his voice saying in your head. _I wish I could have been here with you._

“I know.” you whisper aloud, your small voice lost in the hum of machines keeping him frozen.

You are trying not to look at the bullet wounds, at the dark stain that has spread beneath the cheery blue of his jumpsuit. If you thawed him now, would it still run red?

No. That isn’t what you’re here for. Best to get it over with quick.

Your teeth nibbling on your bottom lip, you crack open the top button of his collar. The tweezers are in your hand. You wince as you dig them into his skin, at the tearing sound that results when you apply enough force to break his frozen skin. 

And then, it’s over. 

There’s a strip of human flesh between the prongs of your tweezers. You drop it into the vial and seal it up tight. It mists the glass at the touch of your warm hand. Hurriedly, you dig the cooler out of your bag and tuck it in. 

You pause to fix his collar, to cover up the ugly wound you’ve inflicted and seal him away again. The coffin closes with a _whoosh_ and the tightness in your chest abates, just a bit. 

You are gone with the press of a button, with a jolt of white-hot energy that smells of ozone and ash as you travel.

***

You are pacing outside the lab door, your hands in your pockets, your shoulders tense. She told you that he would be ready an hour ago. It’s the dead of night and you dearly wish you were sleeping. There were extra tests to run, she said, a few unexpected complications - “Nothing _serious_ , love. Don’t worry...” - to work through before he was fit for surface life.

In the waiting silence of the Institute, your self-doubt comes roaring back with a vengeance. 

_He is dead and you should not have changed that._

_Suppose he dies again, just beyond that door._

_It’ll be your fault, YOURS! You let him -_

“No!” you cry out under your breath, cupping your hands around your ears and making yourself small against the cold wall behind you.

The door hisses as it slides open. Your heart stops. 

The doctor stands there with her clipboard, flushed and beaming. A single hair stands straight up on her head, frazzled and frayed, at odds with her perfect makeup, with her immaculate lab coat.

“Do come in!” she says breathlessly, waving you in with a manicured hand, her bubblegum smile wide and thin. “He's ready to meet you.”

You walk through the door, your head bowed, your brow sweaty beneath your ramshackle helmet, hardly daring to hope until you can confirm - 

There he is. 

You stand there gawping, blinking several times to be sure you’re seeing him right. It’s like looking at a retouched photograph. He seems younger. Softer. The shadows under his eyes are gone, the scars from his time in the Army, erased. Is this what it would have been like had he never been drafted?

Your breath catches in your throat. Your eyes mist over. You're choking. You’re dying. You’re ascending. That's him. Right there, in front of you. 

Breathing, moving, shifting in his seat. Examining you with narrowed eyes.

“Designation N4-73…” the doctor goes on, breaking the silence with a cough and an exaggerated wave of her hand. “…meet Mother.”

He crosses his arms, glaring at you.

“She'll be taking you to the surface. It's dangerous up there, but she’s proven herself to be more than capable. _I_ wouldn’t worry! Now then…” 

She drops her voice and turns to you with an air of conspiracy.

N4-73's ears prick up. He cocks his head, listening intently to every word.

“If it ever gets lost,” she says, her voice a hoarse whisper, “there's a tracking chip installed in his head. You can find it with your pip-boy. Here.”

She hands you an orange holodisk. You obediently fit it into your pip-boy.

A look of sheer horror steals over N4-73's face. He pats the side of his head with a shaking hand, plunging his fingers into his hair. As though he could find it. As though he could rip it out right then and there.

A jumble of code spills across the screen as the program boots up.

“Gah!” N4-73 yelps, clutching at his head. His hair is standing straight up, crackling with static electricity.

The code resolves itself into your map of the Commonwealth. You see your own position next to the marker labeled “C. I. T.” Beside it, there’s a new dot with “N4” picked out in tiny glowing text next to it.

“Seems to be working!” the doctor chirps cheerily, leaning over her desk to glance at the screen, “Well, that should be everything. Pop down here if you need anything. I’ll send you a message when it’s time to do the next assessment. And…”

She smiles, the pearls of her teeth gleaming between her pink lips for a moment.

“…do have fun! You don’t get a chance like this too often at all!”

She rises from her seat, her heels clicking on the floor as she advances toward him. He flinches at her approach. A spark of electricity shocks her hand as she pats him on the head, immaculate nails running through his disheveled hair.

“And try not to rough him up too much, okay?”

His face is blank as she pets him, his body, stiff.

***

You decide to take the scenic route home. There’s a few errands that you need to run and the countryside is beautiful, in its desiccated sort of way.

You set up camp beneath stars that have never been clearer since the ozone layer was burned into ribbons. N4 watches as you light the fire, as you roll out the extra sleeping bag that you bought just for him and pat it affectionately. 

Warily, he sits beside you, the blinding white of his Institute jumpsuit glowing in the light of the campfire. You wish you would have had the sense to have brought something a little less conspicuous for him to wear, but there’s time enough for that. 

You have no idea how to start.

The silence hangs like a lead curtain between the two of you. There is so much that you want to say to _him_. Months of trauma, of sacrifice, of discovery stretching out across the centuries. You want to sob on his shoulder, to fall asleep on his lap, to go home together and never have a care for the outside world again.

But the man sitting beside you doesn’t know you. He brings his knees up to his chest and makes himself small, making sure, always, that the space between you is carefully moderated. He shifts away when you draw closer. He takes care that his fingers do not brush yours when you pass him your canteen. 

So you say nothing, choosing instead to sit in amicable silence as you share a box of Sugar Bombs for dinner. You listen to the crackle of the fire and gaze up at the jewel-like stars (they do not glitter so much as _beam_ ), until your eyelids grow too heavy to bear it any longer.  
Your sleep is peaceful and filled with comforting dreams.

***

In the early morning, he is gone.

You awaken beside the ashes of a dead fire and a sleeping bag that was never used.

Your heart is racing. Your palms are sweating. You feel a migraine coming on, warping the edges of your vision. 

_Shhh,_ you say to yourself, as you try to steady your breathing. _We’ll find him. He can’t have gotten far._

You give your pip-boy a vicious smack for taking so long to boot up.

Some relief comes at seeing the winking green dot on your screen, barely an hour’s walk from your current position. That comfort is swiftly taken from you when you realize _where_ it is that he’s ended up. 

You tear down your camp almost quicker than humanly possible, hurl your supplies into your pack with little rhyme or reason and leap into your power armor as though your life depended on it. 

Less than an hour later you find yourself surveying the Super Mutant camp below you. It’s all ramshackle huts, dripping meat and open flames. You suspect that most of the mutants are still asleep in the largest building. A single guard patrols the road below, its back turned away from your position, steadfastly focused on the other direction.  
The prisoners - _those who have not been killed and strung up_ ( _you don’t know that yet. Stop. Think._ ) - will most likely be kept in a smaller dwelling or the cages stacked up alongside the road. It’s unlikely that you could get into either without a fuss loud enough to rouse the entire camp.  
Rage and sorrow congeals in you as you form your plan. 

With your teeth bared under your helmet, you hit the button that toggles your stealth field. There is plenty of chain to be found below and steel beams strong enough to weather the assault of a terrified mutie. You creep about the camp, barring all entrances to the main building, sealing them with debris that they never suspected would be used against them. Your power armor _whirrs_ with effort whenever you lift something particularly heavy, but the guard never looks your way. When the deed is done, you stand back for a moment and admire your work.

And then you light the entire thing on fire.

The monsters’ terrified screams shatter the morning quiet and the sound of them beating on the walls from within is music to your ears. The smell of roasting flesh and burning plastic wafts through the filter of your helmet. The guard is running toward you, roaring with anger, a spiked club clenched in its meaty green fist.

Without hesitation, you shoot the beast in the knee, the concussion of your shot echoing across the valley. It topples to the ground squealing, the club flying from its hand. When it tries to rise, you take aim and blast a hole through its other knee. When it falls to the ground writhing, you take two steps forward and carefully plant a bullet in each shoulder, one after another. Its arms dangle limply at its sides. Its legs are useless and mangled. You tuck your gun in its holster and advance upon it slowly, the heat of the fire behind you reaching even through the insulation of your power armor. The cries from inside are quieter now.

It squirms on the ground like a worm, spitting curses at you and whimpers of pain intermittently. Both are silenced when you bend down and take hold of its throat. The strength of your gauntlet pierces its flesh, your fingers locking inextricably around its windpipe and squeezing, squeezing, _squeezing._ Its eyes bulge in their sockets. Red foam stains the corners of its gaping mouth. With a resounding _craaaack _, you tear its windpipe free from its throat. The monster falls still. You toss the thing you took from it on the ground.__

__You tear off the door of a locked outhouse, and find him huddling within, his knees drawn up to his chest as he perches on the back of the makeshift toilet seat. The fire burning behind you is reflected in his eyes._ _

__"Why did you do that?" you ask, angrier than you’d meant it to come out, your voice metallic and cold through the filter of your suit._ _

__"…I-I don’t know!" he sputters, putting his foot in the bucket in his haste to back even further into the stall. “AH!”_ _

___He’s cradling one of his arms like an injured bird. The fingers hang limply from his hand._  
“C’mon.” you say a bit more gently, sighing as you hold out your hand. He stares at it, unmoving, a look of horror on his face. It’s the bloody one, you realize, a moment too late. You wipe it on the grass and extend it again.  
He looks at you and then back at the confines of the outhouse.  
Slowly, he takes it. 

__You pick him up and carry him to a patch of woods that isn’t a raging bonfire, hop out of your power armor and tend to his wounds. His arm you finagle into a makeshift splint and your bandana, into a sling. You dab a bit of antiseptic at the blood oozing from a crack in his lip. A dark bruise is spreading along his jaw. You want to take a look at his teeth but every time you try to do so, he clenches his jaw and glares at you._ _

__You offer him a handful of long-expired aspirin for the pain. He takes them with a swig of water from your canteen when you aren’t looking._ _

__An hour passes and he softens a bit. You hear his stomach growling, in perfect harmony with yours as you walk. You dig inside your pack and offer him some brahmin jerky that you bought off a dodgy trader._ _

__"Thanksss." he says begrudgingly, his fat lip slurring his words, his eyes focusing intently on the ground._ _

__He spits out a tooth on the road and carries on as though nothing had happened._ _

____

***

At first, he does nothing but sleep.

He screams in his sleep frequently and no amount of shaking can rouse him from whatever nightmare torments him this evening. You’re hardly getting any sleep yourself. You feel ragged and raw.

In answer to the problem, you decide to fix up the house across the street from yours. The neighbors who lived there are nothing but shadows in your memory. Did they invite you to cookouts? Attend your baby shower? You can be sure of so little in your past. The memories blow away as fast as dust.

Your work is crude but sturdy. You labor to make it as livable as you can - hammering boards over the holes in the walls, pining up hides where windows had once been. You find a carpet that is not totally consumed with mildew and drag it into what was once the main sitting room. You beat the dust out of the cushions of the couch and declare them a fine enough bed. 

When it’s finished, N4 creeps out of his room, squinting like a cave creature in the light. He wears a hole-riddled T-shirt and a pair of threadbare jeans that you scavenged from the dresser of another neighbor. His arm rests in its brightly colored sling, slowly but surely healing. 

You show him around with pride, pointing out all the improvements you’ve made, all the creature comforts you’ve set in place for him. There’s a vase of fresh flowers on the coffee table, the fridge stuffed with water and snack cakes, a stack of your best blankets making a nest on the couch. 

He sits on the couch, the cushions sagging under his weight, his eyes dull and uninterested, his hair, straggly and disheveled. 

You stop talking when you realize that you’ll get no answer from him. Biting your lip, you show yourself out and shut the door behind you.

He doesn’t emerge for a long time.

***

You start out by leaving meals on his doorstep.

You do your cooking in the morning, before the crack of dawn - whatever it is you’ve killed and hung for long enough to render it edible. Most of the time it’s radroaches or venison. The rare mutant hound is a surprisingly toothsome treat. Once or twice, you’ve managed to get ahold of deathclaw steaks.  
(the pleasure of eating them is more in the prestige than the flavor)  
You package up N4’s portion tight enough that wild animals won’t be able to get at them, barring a visit from a living deathclaw, set them down and knock on the door. You wait for five beats before giving up.

And then you go out into the Wastes alone. The old world won’t scavenge itself.

You check your pip-boy repeatedly across the course of the day, finding comfort in seeing the blinking green dot right where you left him, his position varying very little from hour to hour. You know that he’s safe, though you worry about him constantly. 

Once, on your midday break, to your utter shock, you find his marker standing awfully close to the entrance of Vault 111. 

That day, you return home quicker than usual, descend into the vault and seal it up tight from within. You don’t suspect that you or him will gain any benefit from seeing the corpse that bears his face.

On most days, you return when the stars are out, your shoulders wearied by the salvage that has weighed them down across lonely roads and unbroken miles. You stop at N4’s doorstep before heading in. The cooler is always there, the food within, gone.  
You hover a moment, staring and wondering, trying to summon the courage to knock, to say something.

You never do.  
You decide that it’s best to communicate in other ways.

As time passes, you leave other things on his doorstep. A moderately-good jacket that seemed his size. A broken pocketwatch that had no use to you, but a certain beauty in its gears. A crate of vacuum-sealed comic books that you found in a flooded basement. 

Some of your gifts, he rejects, leaving them on the doorstep for days until you accept his decision with resignation and take them away. Sometimes, he’ll accept something for as long as he planned to use it and then put it right back where he found it. This especially applies to books. Once he’d read them, there they were again, out on the doorstep.

That is, until you break into the attic of what you suspect might have once been a tech nerd (the skeleton on the couch below says nothing to confirm or deny this). There’s a nearly pristine collection of Tesla Science Magazines packed away in sturdy boxes. You pick out the best of the bunch, haul them home and deposit them alongside the rest of the things that you’re tempting N4 with today. 

Thinking an article or two looked mildly entertaining, you wait for them to be spit out again so you can read them yourself. Days pass and no such thing happens. At first you think that he did not feel like reading or hadn’t gotten around to it yet. But past evidence and present conjecture suggests that he _does_ read a great deal. He rarely lets a book sit for more than a couple days.  
If a book does not exit his hideaway...does that mean he likes it?

You frequent that attic as often as you can and bring the entire collection home, box by heavy box. They vanish voraciously. Not a one of them reappears on the doorstep. 

You feel like you’re reaching some sort of understanding, though what exactly it entails, you have not the faintest of ideas.

On a whim, you decide to take an extended excursion to Robco. Before you leave, you cook an extra large portion of food for N4 and stick a note in the cooler describing how long you’ll be away. The road is arduous and the robots within are not friendly. You persevere, burned and broken as you are, and make it to your prize - a thick stack of dense technical manuals that makes your eyelids droop from merely glancing at the contents. 

They, too vanish from the doorstep and do not reappear. 

One day, in a fit of determined ambition, you decide that you’re going to haul an entire terminal home. In hindsight, you think that it would have been much wiser to do so _after_ bringing your power armor with you, but what exactly does reason matter in the face of driven passion?

You belt it to your back and haul it home, huffing and puffing all the way, setting it on the ground in front of the doorstep with a grunt and immediately collapsing into your bed without another thought. 

Two days later, you return home as the sun is setting, your shadow long upon the ground - and you look up to see N4 out and about. 

You freeze where you’re standing, in sudden terror of scaring him away, lest you make your presence known and watch from a distance. Your heart aches as you look at him. When was the last time you caught a glimpse of him? A month ago? Your legs beg you to run, to catch him up in your arms. But your feet remain frozen to the ground, rooted in place.

His hair is much longer than it was. His beard is scraggly and untrimmed. He wears the jacket that you gave him and a fresh pair of blue jeans that you pulled from the wreckage of a department store last week. His arm is no longer in the sling, though you can’t tell from here whether or not he’s wearing the arm brace that was provided in the first aid kit that you left him. 

You squint in the dying light, straining to figure out what he’s doing. 

You hear a curse, see him kick something at his feet and then hear the choppy roar of a motor starting up. Apparently satisfied, he circles back around to the front of the house. You hear the creak of a door closing behind him.

You creep closer, strolling leisurely down the road to your house, your curiosity turning your head toward the hum of the generator. You reach the front door and hover on your doorstep for a moment, staring across the road for any kind of clue.

You see a light flash on through the slits in between the windowpanes and their hide coverings.

It’s the green glow of a computer screen.

***

“Shave and a haircut.” you say curtly, pointing N4 to the barber’s chair.

You give the barber his payment and step back as he begrudgingly settles himself into the chair, his eyes narrowed in suspicion as a razor blade is sharpened on a dangling strap before him. 

His knuckles go white as he grips the underside of the chair and his body is stiff as the blade glides over his throat, just barely grazing his adam’s apple. The barber makes one nick and blood oozes from the cut. N4 touches it when the barber turns around to fetch a bit of paper to sop it up with. He stares at the smear of red on his finger for a time before hesitantly wiping it off on his jeans.

The haircut doesn’t turn out quite as well as you’d hoped (you have no pictures left of _him_. Did he look like this when he was alive?), but you feel better about being able to see his face again. There’s a thin scar on his lip where the Super Mutant punched him. You think about kissing it almost daily. You tear your eyes away before you get any more ideas. 

You stroll through the market together, conducting your business as you go. There’s bits and bobs to sell, a sack of tatoes to buy (you toss it into N4’s arms and he crumples under the weight for a moment before straightening up and positioning it on his shoulder), some medicine that you’re running low on, a packet of nails that would come in handy and-

“Syyyyyynth-free shopping!”

You stick your finger in your ear and wince, your thoughts scattered to the wind by the sneering voice screaming mere feet away from your ear. You turn to ask N4 if he still has the shopping list and his face is pale, his shoulders tense. His free hand is clenched at his side.

You decide to keep on walking past that shop.

Eventually, you make it to Commonwealth Weaponry.

Arturo greets you fondly and starts describing a brand new type of flamethrower that just came in.

“It’s top of the line stuff! Shoots balls of fire at a distance much safer than an ordinary flamethrower. The caravan bringing it in tested it on a ghoul nest the other day and ohhhhh boy they didn’t”-

“Not today, Arturo.” you say with a smile as you pull your gun from its holster and set it on the counter. “It’s been jamming something awful lately. Take a look?”

“Hmm.”

He picks it up, closes one eye and looks down the barrel. 

“Hang on…”

He scoots around the counter and hunches over the workbench on the other side, a tiny screwdriver appearing in his hand. You yawn, leaning sleepily against the counter and crossing your arms. Arturo swears softly under his breath and sticks his greasy thumb in his mouth for a moment to ease the pain of having pinched it somewhere. 

You shift your weight and as you do so, your left foot kicks something below. Looking down, you see the sack of tatoes, propped up in the dust against the counter. 

You hear the click of keys behind you. 

There’s a brand new (to Arturo, at least) terminal sitting on the countertop, a single red wire running from it to the cash register. N4 is typing slowly, pecking at the keys with two fingers, his forehead wrinkled in concentration, the tip of his tongue sticking out from between his lips. 

You know you should say something, but the words stick in your throat. Your feet are frozen to the ground. You stare, transfixed.

He hits a button and his face blanches in the green glow of the computer screen.

It all happens in slow motion.

The register drawer glides open.

“Here’s the problem…” Arturo murmurs, snapping something back into place and turning to face you, gun in hand.

His eyes goggling in his head, N4 lunges at the drawer, to shove it closed before-

The register’s bell _dings_ sweetly as the contents of the drawer are made bare.

Arturo’s head swivels at the sound.

“OY!”

N4 crashes against the back shelf, a look of sheer terror on his face, toppling grenades, pistols, a plasma rifle. A box of 10 mms drops on his head, breaks open and scatters a shower of gleaming brass behind the counter. With a strangled cry, he tears out of there like a pack of wild dogs is on his heels, crashing through the crowd, shoving past all who stand in his way.

“…I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” you hearing yourself saying, over and over again, “He didn’t mean it, I swear. Please”-

“ _Didn’t mean_ to crack an honest man’s cashbox?!”

The gun is still in his hand. His face is not as red as it was a moment ago. You gently ease it out of his grip, apologize profusely and pay him double the usual rate.

Months later, when you return to Diamond City for another Market Day, you see that he has a cashbox with a physical key, like everyone else.

***

You find him huddled in the shadows of the ticket booths, his head in his hands, his face buried in the patchy fur of his jacket’s hood. He leans against a bullet-riddled concrete pillar, shivering.

“C’mon.” you say gently, laying down the sack of tatoes at his feet. 

The road home is long and silent. 

When you arrive in Sanctuary, he sets his share of the supplies on your kitchen counter and immediately heads across the street. 

You don’t see him for a week.

***

“You say he was a soldier?” the doctor asks, chewing on the end of her pen. Some of her lipstick rubs off on it, violently pink. Color spreading in a colorless world.

You try to focus on her face.

"Yes." you answer, meeting her in the bespectacled eye. "He was drafted, but he took to the life easily enough. Made friends, rose in the ranks. He was a sociable man, involved in the community even after his term of service was up.”

“It was a different time. A different society. Nature and nurture and all that. Friends are hard to come for anyone these days.”

“That’s true…but…it’s like…”

“Like…?”

“Like he’s a different person. Like he’s got nothing in common with the man I married. And I try to get through to him, I do, God help me, _I do_ …but I don’t know how I...can possibly…”

You trail off, your chest tight, your face hot.

The doctor looks away from her clipboard and sets the pen down. Her manicured eyebrows wrinkle in…sorrow? Disappointment?

“Is this distressing to you?”

You slump in your seat, the air going out of you.

“Yes? Maybe? I don’t know what to think sometimes, seeing _his_ face o-on…mmm...someone else’s body.”

She makes a brisk note and sets the pen down again. She’s wearing a matched set of pearl earrings. They vanish beneath the wave of her hair as she looks up to meet your gaze again.

“Can I ask you how it's adjusting to life on the surface?”

You glance over at the glass room beside you. N4 sits on a hospital bed within, doing his best to scuff up the floor with the heels of his century-old boots. He looks up when he sees your head turn. He stares at you, squinting through the glass, straining - you imagine - to make out what it is you 're talking about.

"Not well." you breathe softly in answer. It feels like a bit of the weight has been lifted, saying it aloud. 

"He seems…afraid. Most of the time. He gets hurt regardless of how well I try to protect him. When I want to reach out, he locks himself away for days. And just when I think he’s safe, when we’re among friends…he’s off picking fights. I don’t know how much longer I can…" you trail off, a throbbing pain forming between your eyes. You rub it angrily. Not here. _Not now._

The doctor is smiling gently at you, her brown eyes soft and kind behind the distortion of her glasses.

“I could fix that.” she says. “Terminate the experiment. Overwrite its personality with one better suited to surface life, if you’d prefer its company that way. I never meant for our little experiment to cause you any harm. Please, if there’s anything I can do to help, name it.”

The door to the glass chamber slides open at the touch of her keycard.

"N4…" you ask, in a faint croak. You pause to clear your throat. You blink away the tears in your eyes, "Are you…happy here?"

He looks up at you, his face blank, his eyes wide. His fingers dig into the edge of the bed. His knuckles turn white. You imagine that you can see the gears turning in his head as he thinks it over. You wonder if synths have literal gears.

His frame sags beneath the weight of his body before you. 

"No." 

You wrap your arms around him, holding him close, your eyelashes brushing his cheek. You can feel the beat of his heart against your chest. He neither hugs back nor offers resistance.

“N4-73…” you whisper, your lips brushing his ear. “Initiate reset.”

He struggles in your grip, pawing helplessly at the empty holster on your hip. You dig your nails into his back.

“A-Authorization code…” 

“ _MMMMPFHH!_ ”

“…Beta 23 Verglas.”

His strivings cease. He falls forward, heavy in your arms. 

Tears spill out of your eyes, drenching the clothes you dressed him in. You stand there, holding him, rocking him like a baby, planting kisses on his neck until there is nothing more in you left to give. 

You breathe a shaky breath out when you feel a hand on your shoulder.

Your headache is gone.

***

She told you that it would take an hour. The door _whooshes_ open in half the time. The doctor peeks out, not a hair out of place on her head.

“We’re all set.” she says, flashing a smile. “I hope this operating system works out better for you. It’s an older model and we’re gradually phasing it out, but it’s quite reliable compared to some of the newer ones, I think.”

You step into the lab, your hands in your pockets, cold sweat beading on the back of your neck. Your mouth is dry and your throat is tight. 

N4 is sitting in a stiff-backed chair, his feet firmly planted on the ground at a distance mathematically equidistant to one another. His hands are folded in his lap. The picture of patient obedience.

“Designation N4-73,” the doctor says with a smile. “Meet Mother.”

"Hello."

His voice is all whirring parts and microchip music. His left eye, independent of the other, casually rolls up into his head.

"How may I serve you?" 

His cheeriness is the programming of a robotic sales assistant, of a gas station attendant waiting with baited breath to serve. 

His left eye rolls down from his skull and focuses on you in tandem with the other. His face is stretched into a rubbery smile that strains the boundaries of his synthetic flesh.

You can 't breathe. The room is spinning around you. You grip the edge of the doctors desk to steady yourself. White-hot pain throbs between your eyebrows and rainbows swirl on the edges of your vision. You breathe out and rub your forehead with two stiff fingers. 

You reload the game.

***

You do not consider it prudent to give him a firearm.

Instead, you fit him with bits and pieces of your old armor, stick a dented helmet on his head and give him very strict instructions to _stay close to me._

It’ll be his first purposeful foray off the beaten path, into the untamed wilds of the Wastes. You don’t feel terribly confident about being solely responsible for the protection of an extra body, but you’re careful not to let it show when he’s looking. You chat amicably as you tramp through dry grass and burnt forests, about anything and everything that comes to mind. He grunts in reply most of the time or stares off into the distance, saying nothing. 

You talk louder to keep the monsters away.

On the second day of your trek, you reach your destination. Cold waves crash on the beach nearby. Paint peels from the sign out front, but its words are still legible.  
_Sandy Coves Convalescent Home._

You draw your gun and knock on the door, calling out for any vagrants within, scanning the premises for any signs of hostile wildlife. When you deem the coast to be clear, you call N4 in after you. Warily, he tiptoes in, looking worriedly at the cracked and sagging walls, his face falling at the sigh of dry bones crushed underfoot. You snap your fingers and point him to the terminal at the reception desk. The screen still glows faintly, powered by some generator below that chugs on, clinging to life far beyond the span of those who built it.

He pulls up a chair and stares at the screen, cracking his knuckles. Then he extends his typing fingers and starts pecking furiously, his tongue peeking out from between his lips. In no time at all, the lock on the cage behind him clicks open and you slip past him to see what you’ve got.

Heart medication, insulin, something for migraines. The pain meds will bring an especially good price. You sweep everything into your sack, leaving not a pill behind in the little pharmacy. 

You pat N4 on the back and praise him for a job well done.

For a fraction of a second, he smiles.

***

He’s wearing a tuxedo with a torn lapel. His hair is slicked back and his chin is riddled with minuscule cuts.

You’re wearing a glittery evening gown that has lost half of its sequins. A lone pearl teardrop hangs from your ear.

The table is lit with a molerat-tallow candle on an ashtray. You’ve cooked brahmin steaks and topped them with mutfruit chutney. Two glasses of pinot noir sit before you, their color far more brown than garnet. 

It doesn’t feel like any birthday dinner you’ve ever had before. 

You pick at your steak halfheartedly, your thoughts weighed down by the knowledge of another year’s passage in this strange life that you did not choose to live.  
Your reverie is abruptly shattered.

“What’s in the vault?”

Your jaw clenches at the words and your blood runs cold. 

“It was open when I first checked in.” he goes on, oblivious to the aneurysm happening in your brain. “But when I went back later…”

“Please.” you choke out, tears rushing to your eyes. Without thinking, you reach across the table and seize his hand. He flinches at your touch and tries to pull away. “There’s nothing down there for you!”

You realize that you’ve made things much worse the instant the words leave your lips. 

There’s nothing for it now.

“Promise me.” you hiss through gritted teeth, squeezing his hand tighter. You hear his knuckles crack beneath your grip. 

“ _Ah…_ ”

“You will not think of that vault ever again.”

“I…promise.”

You let go. He cradles his hand for a moment, flashing you a hurt look before kicking his chair out and rising from the table.

He washes his dishes and retreats across the street.

The wine tastes of vinegar.  
You take to sleeping with your pip-boy on.

***

" _Why?_ " you scream, half-sobbing as you kick down the door. The flimsy lock snaps under the force of your heel, the broken half dangling from the rotten wood that held it.

He jumps at the sound of your voice, but doesn't look up from he's doing.

He’s hunched over a terminal, pecking at the keys with a speed that doesn’t seem possible, given his method for doing so. Wires criss-cross across the floor, leading to glowing lamps, a space heater, a fan that sits on the floor, unused. Boxes upon boxes of magazines are stacked up against one wall. A makeshift bookshelf is lined with dun-colored manuals and crumpled snack cake wrappers.

You yank your gun from its holster, pointing it at the back of his head with an unsteady grip. He hears the click of the chamber and his hands go still.

"I didn't let her take your mind! I give you everything you ever ask for! So, why… _w-why don't y-you…_ "

N4 slowly turns around, his seat swiveling with the movement of his body, his hands in the air. He 's trembling. A bead of sweat trickles down the side of his head.

"I…I don't know." he whispers hoarsely, squeezing his eyes shut and squaring his shoulders.

You put your gun away. Your hand is visibly quivering. It feels like someone’s stuck a dagger in the middle of your forehead. The edges of your vision are blurred and wobbly.

What are you doing?

You put a hand to your head and turn away. When you reach the door, pausing a moment to steady yourself on the splintered frame, he calls out to you.

"You know what would make me happy?" 

You clench your teeth at the bitterness in his voice. Slowly, you turn around to look at him.

He taps the side of his head.

"Getting rid of this."

Your lips tighten. You breathe out in one great huff of air and slam the door behind you.

It falls off its hinges with a resounding crash.

***

You should have buried it.

You should have torn out the console and thrown it away.

But then where would you leave the flowers? 

Could you stand it, never seeing _him_ again, frozen in time?

You are far from home when you see the dot on your pip-boy inching towards the vault entrance. Your breakfast rots in your mouth. You crush the water carton between your fingers. You set out for home immediately, killing dispassionately, cutting down every monster and man that stands in your way and leaving the corpses to dry in the sun.

You arrive at nightfall and slam the button that will bring the elevator back up to the surface. The vault door hangs open, the console jammed with wires and jury-rigged paper clips. The terminal from N4’s room is connected to it all and a small generator keeps it running, the thrum of its engine echoing in the chambers of the cavern below.

You clench your fists at your sides and walk in.

N4 kneels before an open cryopod, staring, still, his body dyed in shades of blue from the cold light of the machines. Water drips from the pod before him, pooling at his knees.

The flowers are rotten, the vases overturned.

“What is this.” he breathes, his head turning towards you at the sound of your approach.

You meet his gaze, your teeth grinding in your skull.  
Your gun is in your hand.

 _He’s_ melting away.

 _His_ face is crumpling, his features sagging into something unrecognizable.  
” _What_ is…”

His voice breaks.

He’s standing, facing you, his fists balled at his sides.

“I told you…” you whisper, tears spilling down your face. “…and you _promised_. And now…”

His eyes narrow as he advances toward you. There’s a wrench in his hand. A heavy, rusty thing, studded with barnacles. Did he pluck it from the lake?

“What...exactly was I _supposed_ to be?” his voice is a low growl, steadily rising in volume, “What did you _think_...argh!”  
He puts a hand to his head as he clenches his teeth.  
“Are you”- you ask softly.  
“Peachy!” he spits venomously, for a moment showing off the gap in his teeth, “Just great! There’s a dead guy down here with my face and a crazy lady who’s been holding me hostage to _God knows_ what ends and I just _couldn’t_ be better!”  
Your back stiffens. You take a step forward.  
“N4…please...”  
“Don’t _touch me_!”  
You reach out for him.  
He swings the wrench.  
You feel it crack the bones of your hand and send a tremor through your trigger finger. The sound of it explodes in your ears.

He falls to the ground wailing, clutching at the mess that was his leg but a moment ago. You watch him writhe, crying your name, cursing you again and again, grinding his teeth, spitting at your feet. 

Shifting hands gingerly, you take another shot. His movements cease.

The vault is silent again, save for the drip of water, the distant hum of machines and the soft sound of your own sobbing. You sit on the floor, your back against the cold steel wall, your gun thrown aside like a toy. Time has no meaning in the constant twilight of the vault. 

You breathe out and wipe your eyes on the sleeve of your vault suit.

You reload the game.

***

“It's defective.” you hear her say. “It _attacked_ you! It’s not even supposed to - that’s grounds for termination, even in an ordinary unit. If this report gets out, Synth Retention has a field day…”

The sound of blood rushing in your ears overwhelms almost all else. 

She reaches out and touches your hand. Her smile is gentle. Her glasses slip down her nose and her eyes peer over the top of them, watery and gleaming.

“I’m so sorry it had to end like this. Just…sign here and I’ll get it over with. It’ll be painless. I guarantee you…”

You shake your head dumbly, your shoulders quaking with the force of your suppressed sobs.

“Please…” she insists, her eyes pleading. “It isn't safe for him to be around other people. You might very well be able to fend him off but not everyone in here can say the same. You can't predict…”

You look over at N4 through the walls of his glass prison. His bad arm is in a makeshift sling, after you sprained it to get the wrench out of his hand. There’s a lump on your shoulder where he hit you with it before you could do so. 

He sits on a gurney, his body still, his feet on the ground. His eyes are closed, his face, stiff. He looks like one resigned to his fate. 

“Do you want to say goodbye?”

The fog lifting from your mind at long last, you turn to look at her. In that moment, you _see_ her as you have never seen her before, every detail picked out in vivid perception. Her earrings gleam under her perfect hair. Her contouring is immaculate, her brightly-colored lips stretched into a sad smile. Her hand pats yours reassuringly, the long white tips of her nails grazing your skin.

“I know it’s hard.” she whispers gently, “But in the future”-

You whip out your gun and blow her face into smithereens, point-blank, before she has a chance to say anything more.

The room spinning under your feet, you bolt from your chair, turn to the locking mechanism keeping her office door closed and fire another round into it. The thing sparks and hisses. You can hear shouting outside. Some sort of alarm’s going off.

A wail building in your throat, you dig through the pockets of her bloody lab coat and tear out the keycard you’re looking for, ripping it from the cord it’s attached to. N4 is pounding on the glass, mouthing words that you can’t hear through the soundproofing within. You drop the keycard twice and on the third try, you manage to slide it through the feeder. 

Someone’s pounding at the door. You hear the sound of racing footsteps. 

N4 stumbles out as the door slides open and you throw your arms around him, squeezing as though you’ll never let go. 

“ _No no nononononono…_ ” you hear yourself saying, your tears soaking his shoulder, your nose running with salty snot.  
He’s hugging you back with his good arm, whispering garbled apologies in your ear.

He cries out sharply when you pinch his bad arm between your bodies too hard and you pull away quickly. You see blood speckling his T-shirt and suffer a moment of panic.  
_No, it came from you,_ you realize. You look down and see yourself splattered with it. You reach up and your hand comes away from your face sticky.

N4 crouches over the fallen body of his creator, a look of faint horror on his face. He reaches down and pulls something from the shattered shards of her skull.  
A little black piece of plastic.

"A synth." he breathes. His skin turns a wan shade of green. You didn’t think synths could get sick.

You see the light of a laser cutter sawing through the door, a molten red line inching its way around the jammed door.

“This isn’t…” he gasps, his voice rising in panic, his hand shaking as he drops the component atop the corpse he took it from. “She’s still”-

You grab his good arm and slam the teleport button on your Pip-Boy.

***

There are synths in Sanctuary.

They come during the night, bearing _his_ face, twisted into grim and cruel expressions, dressed in pristine white, wielding laser rifles that never seem to lose a charge. 

There’s too many of them to fight. 

You flee, taking to the woods, to the wild places untouched by the stink of humanity. Your existence is harried and desperate. They find you, always, and ambush you in the worst possible places. Your every plan is thrown out of whack, your every nerve, frayed to the last fiber. Your camp is found within hours of setting it up, on a daily basis, for weeks. 

Far later than you would have figured it out had you been getting an adequate amount of sleep, you come to the conclusion that she is finding you by way of N4’s tracking chip. 

Through trial and error with him and the screen of your pip-boy, you discover that the effect can be mitigated with a quadruple layer of aluminum foil wrapped around his head. He’s miserable, looks like a martian from an old comic book and the sweat pours down his neck in the heat of the day, but it buys you time. 

You find your footing and form a plan to fight back.

***

N4 hacks into an old military radio tower and from there, intercepts a signal from the Institute. You hear a tale of a renegade element over the airwaves - of a researcher whose requests were denied time and time again. She had wanted to build a synth with the DNA of her grandfather, to write a program that would replicate the exact patterns of his mind. Father - before his untimely death - had turned her down multiple times before. _Such a synth would be unstable, unbalanced. There’s too many mutations in his DNA for it to work._  
The body was cremated like all the others.  
The Board was not eager to overturn his judgement.

She did her research in secret, stole supplies that were not allotted to her, used machines off the clock. She left the Institute a moment before she would have been thrown out, spiriting away a great deal of components with her and gallons upon gallons of synthetic blood by modified teleporter. 

They were searching for her now, synths of all levels - Gen 1s, 2s, multiple teams of coursers - combing the Wasteland for the barest hint of her presence.

They had found nothing.

Two days after you piece together the story, N4 comes to you with an idea.

***

He kneels before you on the grass, his fists clenched on his knees. He wears nothing containing metal - that awful T-shirt he’s been trapped in for a week, a pair of sweatpants. His boots are cast off and haphazardly thrown to the side, his steel-toothed zippered jacket tossed on top of them. A modified headset sits on the ground before him, its multicolored wires converging into a makeshift plug that sticks awkwardly from the port of your pip-boy.

His jaw is set and his eyes are closed. His breaths are deep and slow. You think for a moment, that he might be praying. You wonder what sort of god a synth might find solace in.

There’s an old leather wallet on his lap, sturdy enough to have survived from the time when paper currency and credit cards were the norm. Its dull surface is dimpled with the imprint of teeth, the marks of a round of failed and painful tests. He opens his eyes and picks it up, tracing the smooth indents with his fingers before raising it to his mouth.

“Stop when I pass out.” he says softly, meeting your worried gaze for a moment, a flash of tired defiance in his eyes, “If it doesn’t work…we’ll go somewhere else and try it again.”

He bites down on the wallet and closes his eyes. Slowly, he pulls the tinfoil hat free of his head and sets it aside.

The hairs stand up on the back of your neck. You can feel her eyes on you from a distance, wherever she is. Your power armor is close at hand if things take a turn. You’ve chosen a good-sized hill with a decent view of the surrounding countryside to do this on. Sneaking up on you will be a little more difficult, at least. Though the forest cover worries you.

He’s adjusted the headset comfortably over his ears. He gives you a thumbs-up as an all-clear signal.

You bite your lip and flick the switch that will start the program.

N4 screams through his teeth as they chomp down on the wallet and topples to his side, convulsing. His body twists in on itself, his muscles contracting into a twisted mockery of the fetal position. Your finger hovers over the button that will make it stop and you have to tear it away lest you find yourself pressing it too soon. You grit your teeth and block out his wordless, vibrating screams, filling your line of sight with the glowing map before you. A dull pain throbs in the middle of your forehead as you concentrate, your eyes wide, your every ounce of perception focused on this single task.

You see only N4’s position marked, the lone dot flashing erratically as electricity courses through the chip sending the data. With a tremor of fear, you realize that he’s grown quiet. Your hand moves to shut it off, despair of never being rid of this woman weighing you down, but then - 

Faintly, another dot lights up, flashes once and fades away. 

You sear the coordinates into your mind, carving them on the inside of your skull with fire, jackhammering them into the concrete of your memory. 

You flick the switch, pull the plug and drop it on the grass. N4 twitches a few more times and then falls still. You hold your breath, the voice in your head wailing inside of you. Your hands are useless, your thoughts, worse.

_He is dead. You know this. You know that can’t be changed._

“No.” you whisper aloud, lunging forward and grabbing him by the shoulder. 

A crackle of electricity jolts up your arm and you pull away with a gasp of pain. The moment it subsides, you grab him again, rolling him onto his back.

“ _N4!_ ” you cry, your voice breaking as you tear the headset from his head and slap him lightly on the scruffy cheek. “You did it. I’ve got it. We have to go.”

He opens his eyes and groans, lying there for a moment before pulling the wallet out of his mouth with a shaky hand. You prop him up against a rock and fit the tinfoil hat back on his head, smoothing it down to fit the contours of his head again. He looks at you blearily as you ease his feet back into his boots and lace them up tight. 

You think you see shadows moving in the woods below, but you can’t be sure. Your heart beats faster. You shove everything that’s left into your pack and sling it over the shoulder of your power armor. You hop into it yourself and feel a bit more secure as it closes around you.

N4 snuggles into your armored chest as you pick him up and cradle him like a baby, carrying him through lonely hills and silent woods as night draws near around you. You make camp in the shadow of a crumbling freeway, where the wind whistles through crooked nooks and ancient bullet holes. 

There’s one snack cake left, smushed at the bottom of your pack. N4 smiles when you hand it to him. You pull out a fuzzy wad of molerat jerky for yourself. 

You show him the map and dream up plans of attack together long into the night.

***

She knew that you were coming. She set up defenses. She cloned an army. She dug herself deep into the earth, hid behind a deadly gauntlet of traps and tricks.

Your footsteps crunch on the bones of the lives you’ve taken. You’ve killed _him_ a hundred times over, broken _him_ again and again until you no longer think anything of doing so. 

Your armor smokes as you walk. You smell it through the shattered filter of your helmet, feel the weight of your armor dragging you down, the bent frame pinching you as you breathe. You think you might have broken ribs, but the truckload of stims surging through your bloodstream convinces you otherwise…for now.

Your arms are monstrously heavy and your hands shake as you reload your gun, the clip nearly slipping through your clumsy fingers. You want to lay down, to close your eyes in the quiet darkness of the caverns, but you know that you cannot stop now. 

With the dwindling reserves of your armor’s power, you tear the door from its frame and crumple it like paper. A bullet whistles through the air, lodging itself in the visor of your helmet, inches from your eye in its network of lacy cracks. 

The doctor stands before you, a pistol in her shaking hand, her teeth bared and smeared with lipstick, her hair, a wild halo around her sweaty face.

Her bullets _ping_ off you as you advance, ricocheting into banks of machinery, shattering glowing plastic lights.

You grab her arm and shake the gun out of her hand. You bend the weapon like putty in your grip and drop it on the ground before her with an echoing _clunk_.

Black tears are pouring down her face, mascara running in rivulets as she clutches at the arm you just squeezed.

“I tried to _help you_!” she screams, running forward and beating on your armor helplessly, “Don’t you understand? That thing has a mind of its own! Pain, programming - those things don’t matter to it! If you try to keep it in set parameters, it’ll push right through! Keep it and it’ll hurt you! Let it loose and”-

You take two steps back and shoot her in the knee. The gunshot echoes like cannon-fire. 

She falls to the ground wailing, clutching at her shattered extremity. 

You step back and press the button of the pager clipped to your belt. Far away, you imagine another pager vibrating on a desk in a room full humming terminals, startling the synth who’d been waiting for the signal. 

You rest and wait.

You take your helmet off and breathe a bit easier. You watch the doctor strain as she rips off a sleeve of her labcoat and ties it into a makeshift tourniquet. You make no comment and do not try to stop her when she makes an attempt at rising and immediately falls, quaking, to the ground. 

Your ears perk up when you hear footsteps coming down the hallway.

Warily, N4 pokes his head into the room. He’s covered with grease and little electrical burns that trail up his forearms. His jaw tightens when he sees her, lying on the ground.

“N4-73…” she chokes out, propping herself up on her elbows, “Initiate Reset. Authorization c-code…”

You stare her down, not moving an inch. N4 creeps the rest of the way into the room.

“B-Beta 23 Verglas.” 

N4 stands where he is, regarding her coldly, a wrinkle in his brow as he thinks.

“I _SAID_ ”- she shrieks, squirming on the floor, “Beta 23…”

You anticipated this. It was N4’s idea to plug his ears with wax, him who studied the audio feedback loop in the brains of the synths you’d killed. Communication was a touch more difficult than necessary and the pit of fear that it wouldn’t work had only dissipated upon delivery of direct evidence.

You have to admit, as you smile to yourself as her voice grows shriller, as her features strain and stretch into a mask of growing terror, that you’re exceptionally pleased with him.

You reach down, straining against the weight of your armor and pull the thing you’ve been saving from a pouch on your hip.

 _Yours?_ you mouth at N4, holding the wrench out to him like a lady presenting her knight with a sword.

Its head is a mess of rust and sharp-edged barnacles. Your shoulder twinges looking at it, remembering the feel of its blow. He takes it, feeling its weight in his hands, running his finger along the edges of the barnacles. 

“INITIATE RESET! AUTHORIZATION C-CODE B-BETA TWO T-THREE-E-E…”

She breaks down into ugly, heaving sobs as he approaches, the wrench swinging loosely in his hand, his shoulders stiff and squared. 

He stands there for a moment, his eyes squeezed tight, his hand on his head. Blood drips from his nose and electricity crackles through his hair. He sways on his feet for a moment. You’re about to ask him if you should finish the job. And then-

He stoves in her skull with a wild cry, hitting and hitting and _hitting_ before her screams cease and her body falls still. He keeps going long after the point at which she could have felt pain, crying and shrieking in inhuman tongues, breaking every bone in her body, grinding her to pulp, mashing her under his feet.

You watch him, unmoving. Unblinking.  
The wrench slips from his hand and he falls to his knees, holding himself and shivering. An arc of electricity bends around his head like a halo and fizzles away.

He's covered in blood and bone and meat. You can’t tell how much of it is his and how much belonged to her. You slip out of your power armor and clutch at your side, catching your breath for a moment before you stagger on.  
You do not sit so much as fall beside him.

He snaps out of it with a jerk as you touch him, his eyes wide and pale in the midst of the dark blood drying on his face. And then, he hugs back, burying his face in your shoulder, his bloody tears soaking your jacket, his hands leaving deep red stains on your clothes. Your nose is filled with the scent of iron, with the musk of death.

The blood dries on your skin as he holds you, the sound of the machines gradually overtaking his whimpering tears.

**Author's Note:**

> In the final installment of GODDESS OF DESTRUCTION and Undead Tech Nerd:
> 
> The daring duo takes a harrowing joyride down memory lane! Will their newly defined relationship get out of it intact??
> 
> N4 makes a final request of his disturbed benefactor. Will she honor it??
> 
> SMUT!!


End file.
